Sunday, December 30, 2012

Are The 2013 Yankees Doomed?

So what's been going on lately in Yankee news? Nothing? Really? Well, I suppose it's time to be creative and pull a subject out of thin air.

A lot of fans such as myself have been sitting back and waiting for Ninja Cashman to pull off a big trade. Maybe not a "big" trade, but something along the lines of the Nick Swisher deal he pulled off after the 2008 season. After all, I haven't read anybody that's excited about the outfield of Granderson, Gardner, and Suzuki. I should talk about a deal possibly involving an upgrade behind the plate, but I honestly don't think that's a big deal. I agree with the idea of simply having a strong defensive catcher. Heck, our starting catcher last season put up a batting line of .211/.311/.403, so it's not like we need an all-star caliber player back there to be competitive.

But does the team really need a "big" trade, or something close to it, in order to compete in 2013? To start to answer that question I decided to take the proposed 2013 starting position players, along with the proposed starting rotation, and look at their Wins Above Replacement from Baseball Reference (bWAR) in 2012.

SP1: Sabathia - 3.3
SP2: Kuroda - 5.2
SP3: Pettitte - 2.4 this is his bWAR in 2010, since he only threw 75.1 innings in 2012 due to injury, and didn't pitch at all in 2011
SP4: Hughes - 1.5
SP5: Phelps - 2.0

PITCHING TOTAL: 14.4

C: Stewart - 2.9 Stewart only had 157 PA, therefore his bWAR was extrapolated to 500 PA. And I'm using Stewart as he had the highest bWAR among the 3 catching candidates for 2013.
1B: Teixeira - 3.6
2B: Cano - 8.2
3B: Rodriguez/Youkilis - 1.55 I took 1/2 of each player's bWAR in 2012, and adding them up, since ARod may be out half the year and Youkilis would be playing 3B for that half.
SS: Jeter - 2.1
LF: Gardner - 3.7 I'm using his 2011 bWAR, since he missed too much of 2012.
CF: Granderson - 2.7
RF: Suzuki - 1.6
DH: ???/Youkilis - .55 Only uses 1/2 of Youk's 2012 bWAR, as he'll be the primary 3B in the first half of this season. The other half of the DH equation is unknown, so I'm leaving it at "???".

BATTING TOTAL: 26.9

GRAND TOTAL: 41.3

"Yeah, I'm going to need some context here."

The 2012 Yankees weren't as good as I'd hope they'd be, but you can't tell me they were terrible. After all, they did make it to the American League Championship Series. So how did that team do as far as bWAR, looking at their starting position players and starting rotation?

I wanted to say that a good bullpen can help or hinder a team, so not including them in the above numbers is not me disregarding them. It was simply too difficult for me to break down the bullpen into it's most important parts, since not all bullpen members are created equal. And by not including each bullpen member, I don't believe I could accurately put a number on them. But I do want to say that the 2013 Yankees bullpen does look to be a good one. I don't mean to say they'll be "lights out" awesome, but they should be good enough that the difference between their bullpen and any other team's bullpen is not enough to skew the numbers much at all.

I don't mean to say that the Yankees are on their way to the 2013 World Series, but looking at these numbers does make me feel a little bit better about the team's chances of having a successful season. Either way, I'd like to see the Ninja work his magic again.